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from A Gone Body

BY Thomas Kane

some men by a company gun. some by the venom of a timber
snake. some at the hands of a scoundrel. some men
from a stubbornness of faith and some from the dumb luck
of livery work. but always, always, with the left behind
task of saying: here is
a tourniquet. here, the pipe part of a pipe.
here is a whole mess of buckshot. here is a jar, full-up with coins.

here is a throwaway razor. here are throwaway glasses. here,
Veronica Lake, un-humbled
by the dark recess of a drawer. here is unexplained
and some time ago. here is a record of
vaccinations, an almost-done
sweetheart letter, a copied out prayer.
here is the dust that clothed a fiddle. here is a skyline scanned for crows.

here is a list compiled in youth: skunk tree, pecker tree,
father’s arms, tree of up to no good. here
is a list revised: hackberry, blighted
and mercifully scorched, white ash,
county seat of starlings.
here is an inkwell and here is a picture of three boys,
each wearing the black, leather boots of a much older man.

here is a gone body. here is the company he keeps:
Sunday suit, morsel of whalebone
he reckoned good luck.
here is a pending quarrel over remnants,
a singing voice doing what it can with a psalm.
here is discontent with the pale
of a shadow. here is a wishing that things had been otherwise.

Biography

THOMAS KANE holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Missouri. His poems have appeared in Parthenon West Review, Bat City Review and McSweeney’s. He also edited and co-translated Tomaž Šalamun’s There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair (Counterpath Press, 2009).